I once had a customly designed project for an external client of a web-development company were I was technical lead and the sales guy who sold it to the customer without ever consulting us about it had the project management responsability.
On the very first day the guy got me, the junior developer and the designer together for the project launch meeting and started saying how we would have to work extra to make it fit his (ridiculously short) deadlines and I just said “No, it’s not at all possible to fullfill those deadlines so that’s not going to happen” and when he tried to argue with “what about the client” I replied that “You came up with those estimates and gave them to the client without even talking to us, the experts in that domain, so managing the fallout with the client from that is your problem not ours”.
I fondly remember all that because of the transition from downtrodden and unhappy to absolute happiness visible on the face of the junior developer when, after the sales guy / project manager gave us the “work extra hard” spiel I (as the tech lead) replied with “No, that’s not going to happen”.
(Ultimatelly the project took twice as long as the sales guy’s estimates)
The whole “putting the cart in front of the oxen” (as we say in my country) of this meme reminded me of that one (and that memory invariably puts a smile on my face).
English is normally “putting the cart before the horse”. Mind if I ask what country uses ox for such a similar saying? I just like language quirks
Also fuck that guy and good on you for telling him to fuck off with his nonsense.
The version, with the ox is from Portugal. Specifically the Portuguese saying literally translates as “put the cart in front of the oxen” (so we use plural oxen rather than horse).
My old manager sent out invitations to the bride‘s family before telling me I was the groom.
(he publicly announced the new product‘s price and release date before telling the dev team that there will be a new product)
I’ve never had a boss who didn’t do this. Promise, set timeline and price, get contracts signed, then come to the development team to ask whether it’s possible to do by Wednesday. Many years ago I had a boss who promised a major client that we’d provide an entire online advertising network to rival Google Ads, and gave us 4 days to design, develop and deliver it. Then when it wasn’t ready he threw one of the developers under the bus in a meeting with the customer. He actually used the words, “This is Dave’s fault.” Dave was professional and didn’t argue. Good look for a CEO. I’m sure he thought he had won. The project went nowhere because all the execs had different ideas about what it was supposed to do, and the dev team was oddly unmotivated to help them out.
Research projects:
“I’ve set the wedding date. I’m not sure they exist.”
The grant proposal:
“They definitely exist, and this marriage will change the world. The wedding must be funded now or else we risk someone else marrying them and getting all the credit for the wedding.”
Isn’t this what Agile* is supposed to solve?
*The actual principles of Agile, not whatever bastardised version your team is doing!
In proper agile you don’t have end goal and date set, however management needs end goal and a date.
Doesn’t a definition of done count as a goal?
That’s just how you know when you’ve finished
How is that different from a goal?
Not being argumentative. Just seeing if I’m missing something.
In my experience DoD is too pithy to be a goal. DoD is things like all code checked in, all PBIs done. Sure you’re trying to get your code finished, but your goal is more like add this functionality to the system rather than check in the code and close the PBIs
I see. So dod could be the same across multiple goals.
Also thank you for getting me to think on this, unless I’m challenged I often don’t know how I came to an idea
